"In this anniversary, I'd like to shed some light about my first-hand experience with [OS/2], especially since I see many attempts at history re-writing and over-simplification, when people compress OS/2's two decades into a single paragraph. An OS/2 user named Roger Perkins wrote to OS/2 newsgroups ten years ago: "Here's to OS/2's 10th Anniversary on April 2nd! No OS has ever died so many times!"

I saw an interview with Rico Mariani, who was in the Visual Studio tools division before it really existed (since 1992 or so). He pointed to one of the big reasons that IBM lost with OS2: They were trying to make money off the SDKs. Back in the mid-90s Microsoft was giving out copies of VC++ at college campuses to anyone who had a pulse. They were selling it on the open market for $60, which was not high compared to the price of printing and packaging the documentation that came with it (i.e. VS 5.0: tree-killer edition). I even got a copy of this as a kid on one of my birthdays and it was my first compiler when I was learning C++. Now Microsoft gives away all of the tools for essentially free.

IBM, on the other hand, charged real money for their dev tools, so it's obvious why it didn't take off with software vendors like Windows did.